The Last Last Talk

The last talk of a meditation series to a group of meditators in Massachusetts. This talk contains parting advice to a group a practitioners to keep their minds inspired, connected to the practice, and how to bring more practice into our daily lives.

Please note: This track was recorded live and may contain background noises.

Transcript

Okay,

So this is the last,

Last talk for the next three months.

And as you guys know,

I'll be traveling across the country these next three months.

So I'll try to be back here December,

January,

February to lead another 10-week class.

And while I'm gone for those next three months,

The most important thing to know is that you need to get the proper winter clothing because it gets colder in those three months.

So that's really important to know.

I would also say it's important to know that everything is okay.

And that's something that I've been learning more and more is that everything's okay.

And even when things are not okay,

They are moving in the direction of being okay or depending on your own efforts,

They can become okay again,

Even much quicker than you could ever imagine.

So to kind of dissect a little bit the shares from everybody and then also incorporate these questions,

What I heard is that for the two of you,

It was really about making peace with the moment,

Right?

Feeling what you're feeling.

So your whole thing was getting rid of the aversion,

Maybe towards things that were unpleasant that you were feeling,

Just to experience them directly and say,

What's the big deal actually?

It sounded like the two of you mentioned something along the lines of pulling a judgment off of the meditation in terms of having a good meditation and what that looks like or what the goal of meditation should or shouldn't be kind of thing.

And really just allowing yourself to be in the process.

And it seems like your share had to do with the understanding that doing the doing mind is not the meditative mind and that actually you have to just let go and just be and really just be here.

And it's as kind of simple and maybe as difficult as that.

So I just think that that's a nice reflection because that's also,

You know,

If we took a larger and larger cross section of people,

We would probably come up with a lot of the same things.

A lot of people just need to know maybe your only problem is that you're fighting things.

Maybe your only problem is that you're not making peace with how things are.

Another huge cross section of people maybe you think that you should be doing things differently.

That there should be a certain result that you're getting that you're not getting or something like this.

And then there's a whole other cross section of people that maybe need to learn how to just be.

How to just let go of their doingness and learn that being is actually all there is.

And these are all connected in different ways but they're all different kind of aspects of it.

And that's really what's beautiful about this practice and also why I love,

You know,

I read the Buddhist teachings but I also love listening to other monks and practitioners talk because everyone has a little bit of a different take.

You know,

It's almost if the sun was coming in through a house of mirrors and then all the mirrors were reflecting the sun around,

You know,

You're getting the sun but you're getting it from all these different angles in different ways.

That's kind of my feeling with the teachings is that it passes through each of our own individual filters,

Has to bounce off of all of our wisdom and our understandings and it also is reflected through our ignorance and our craziness.

Because if you really think about it,

All of the realizations you've had,

It's because something that when you came into this room was a spot of ignorance and that flipped over into a spot of wisdom.

Yeah,

That through this practice there was something in you that didn't understand and then you understood and it became a gain for you.

And that's a really important thing to realize is that all of our misunderstandings,

All of our ignorance,

All of our faults and failures and shortcomings and all of the things about us that maybe we would even try to hide from others or that we judge ourselves or that we don't really like about ourselves or even the things that are just our big blind spot that other people have told us but we still don't see it.

All of that stuff actually is fodder,

Is fuel,

Is a potential for wisdom.

And that's also when in Buddhism we do the Namaste and in India if you go to Namaste in Nepal also with the two hands like this and that's the lotus flower because the lotus grows out of mud,

It grows out of stinky muck and it grows into this beautiful flower where even water can't attach to it.

Water just beads right off of lotus leaves and flowers.

And it's that understanding for all of us that we all are coming from a place of dirt and mud and muck and shit and stuckness and difficulty and we're growing into a place through that,

We're transforming that,

We're transmuting that on the journey upwards to the light to the surface and eventually breaking up and then breaking out and kind of being this really beautiful thing.

And I personally really try to use all of life's situations to learn from.

And if you want to look more closely at all of your shares,

That's something that they all actually have in common.

This idea of making peace with whatever's there,

That has a big part to do with life right now in this moment have something to teach me.

Taking back our expectations on how the meditation should be,

Right or wrong,

Good or bad,

And just kind of being with whatever's there.

That's life right now in this moment has something to teach me.

Not doing something but really just sitting and being.

This quality of just be,

Be here.

Right now.

So in the praises to the Buddha,

The Dharma,

And the Sangha,

And this is back from the time of the Buddha,

So you know,

2500 years old,

There's a series of praises that the Buddha said you can reflect on these praises if you need to like inspire yourself,

You know.

And the praises to the Buddha,

You know,

Talk about how he is fully self enlightened and he's the teacher of gods and men and it's kind of this whole kind of like little grand statement about who he is and all the things he does and knower of worlds and all these things like this.

And then the next one it's about the Dharma.

Dharma means the teachings,

Right?

So Dharma meant also phenomenon or just nature or truth or how things are,

Right?

There's a lot of ways to kind of say it,

But the Buddha,

He said I teach the Dharma and that kind of just means is that I just talk about the way things are,

Right?

Just that simply,

I just look at things and say how things are and I try to make them clear for people to see.

And one of the qualities of the Dharma,

The praises of the Dharma is that the Dharma it's now,

That it's always applicable,

Yet it's not delayed in nature.

That right now,

Right now,

Always right now,

You can make experiences of Dharma.

Right now,

You can look at how things are and how am I misperceiving them.

If you look at what each of you said,

And this would be true if I had 500 people in this room and we did a share and I said,

What have you learned from this class?

What did you get?

All of the shares,

One thing they'd have in common is that people would say in some form or another that I came thinking things were like this or I came perceiving things like this and then I realized,

Oh no,

Things weren't like that,

They're like this.

And oftentimes when the Buddha would give a teaching to somebody,

The response would be,

Oh my God,

Thank you.

It's like you've,

You've righted something that was wrong,

Right?

Like almost like you've stood something up that had fallen over.

It's as if you've brought a light into a dark place,

Right?

This understanding that it's kind of brought this light,

This clarity,

This understanding to something where before there was darkness or a misunderstanding.

And that's all that this practice is.

It's constantly about removing our wrong understandings,

Making new right understandings.

Yeah,

Flipping our view,

Changing our perception and our view and our understanding in a way that's more in accordance with the way things are.

And that's really all there is to it.

And again,

That is always available.

There is this Thai forest teacher,

Achant Chah,

And he went off as a wandering monk for many years.

I don't even know if it was like 20,

30,

40 for a long time was just wandering and learning by just being in the jungles of Thailand,

Making all these experiences.

And then eventually he,

You know,

Was near a village and they said,

Oh,

There's this swamp over there and it's haunted and there's ghosts and there's robbers and murderers and snakes and then tigers and all of this horrible things.

And he said,

Oh,

That sounds like a great place to practice.

So he just went and he stayed in that swamp and slowly people started coming to the swamp to pay respect and get teachings.

Then monks started coming and it built up this whole community.

And now it's like this giant monastery and like villages around there and stuff because he opened it back up and he gave a lot of really beautiful,

Very simple teachings.

You know,

He would say things like,

If you grab,

If you want to grab a snake,

If you grab it by the head,

It'll bite you right away.

But if you grab it by the tail,

The head will spin around and then bite you.

And he said,

It's like the same way,

Grabbing at happiness or suffering,

Right?

Pleasure or pain,

Right?

If you're grasping onto your pain,

You get hurt right away.

If you grasp at happiness,

That's okay.

But eventually it's going to come down and still cause you pain.

Right?

So he said,

It's better to leave the snake alone completely,

Right?

Don't grasp onto either one.

Just be,

Right?

So he had this really beautiful way of just talking about things the way that they are,

Right?

Being the way that it is and really saying that,

You know,

The biggest problem in all of this is that we are misperceiving,

Right?

The biggest problem in all of this is that we think things look one way.

And one of his students said to him,

You know,

In the Buddhist teachings,

They talk a lot about ignorance.

So they said,

Oh,

Achang,

What is ignorance?

How do I see ignorance?

And he looked at them and he said,

It's like you're riding on a horse and you're asking me where is the horse?

He said,

Look around.

Yeah.

That if you really just look,

And this is why it's so crazy and amazing and beautiful and profound and subtle and important,

It's because it's in our face all the time,

But we just don't see it.

You know,

And that's kind of what you guys have been seeing slowly in this class is that there's these really important truths that are kind of just right in front of your face,

But you're just not seeing them.

And you need whether a teaching that says it hits a certain spot in your mind or you have to make a certain experience or something happens and you get that aha moment.

And then you realize,

Oh my God,

This thing that's been in front of my face,

That's not really,

You know,

You can put it down or you can kind of flip it or readjust it.

And I guess maybe that's just what learning is anyway.

That's what learning is all about in some ways.

But I know the learning that we do in school,

It's often about labeling and conceptualizing,

Right?

It's a lot of you look at a cloud that is a cloud,

You stick a concept on it,

That is a house,

That is my mom,

That is this,

You know.

So it's a lot about sticking concepts and understanding.

So as people get older,

They often go through life not even experiencing things anymore with their senses.

They're just living in a world of concepts.

Yeah there's a lot of people you walk around,

Oh I know what that thing is,

I know what that thing is,

I know what that thing is.

You know,

The last time you just lay down in the grass and looked at a cloud and didn't say oh I just know what those things in the sky are so I don't pay attention.

What if you just sat and actually looked at it and said wow that's just beautiful.

Yeah that direct experience of things.

And then maybe you'd watch a cloud and you'd say oh it's interesting,

A cloud it's always changing and moving and morphing and opening up and kind of fading away as it's being created.

You know there's a lot of wisdom to be had in a cloud if you really just looked at it.

It's kind of like shows you the nature of everything.

Right,

A cloud it looks like a thing but the more you look at it the more you see it's actually morphing and opening up and evolving and separating and that,

You know,

That's the same as this body that I'm in.

It's kind of,

It looks like this thing but if you went in microscopically or even on the gas level or the water level you'd see that this body is always changing and cycling like that cloud is.

Actually if I looked at anything I would see that it's just changing and morphing and opening up and that that's like the reality of the universe.

It's just always changing.

I think Einstein even mentioned something like he was so smart,

He became so smart because he was a slow learner.

I think he said he like,

You know,

He failed math or something in high school or whatever it was.

But he said he was a slow learner but because he was a slow learner he really spent a lot of time just looking at things.

You know he said when everyone else was like in,

You know,

High school with high school minds he still had like an elementary school mind,

You know.

But because he was looking at things much slower and more of like a simple way he was able to see things that other people had missed or just sped past.

And I'm convinced that it's the exact same thing.

That because instead of just taking all the ideas and concepts and stories that were given to him he spent a lot of time really just looking at things and just observing them and trying to understand them himself and seeing if he could and then also you hear the concepts and the stories you go well those are great but they don't exactly match what I'm seeing.

There has to be also other things to talk about here.

And that's kind of how he used,

You know,

In Buddhism we say that concentration leads to wisdom,

Meditation leads to wisdom because he would concentrate on something and really sit there with it and watch it and just let it play in his mind and then he would start to get these insights into it.

And that's the other part of meditation,

Right.

So one part of the meditation is the stilling of the mind and the dropping and all this.

And another part of meditation then is the insights that we gain from it,

The insights into how the mind works and insights into our relationship with life or our minds and different ways maybe that could be shifted so we suffer less or more peaceful or more free.

That these insights into the nature of the world and the nature of reality which starts changing our understanding,

Starts opening up.

It starts bringing our entire lives more in line with truth.

And so these practices although they're right now for us kind of originating in this library,

The repercussions of them they stretch far and wide.

They stretch into all corners of our life,

Everything that we do.

And there are meditative and mindful activities that one can do and those are endless.

If you read,

You know,

Thich Nhat Hanh,

He wrote a book,

Pieces Every Step,

And he talks about washing the dishes mindfully and how everyone's just trying to get the dishes finished and it's this like chore inverted.

And he's like,

I love washing dishes.

It's like warm water and soap and it's really like this nice process when you're just there with it and like what's your just hands are in this like warm water and you have this clean thing afterwards and he's like what's the big deal?

You know,

And bringing mindfulness to everything you do to slow things down just to be present.

Instead of seeing everything as,

You know,

I need to get this done,

Really dropping in with it,

Maybe you'd find a whole new appreciation because you're just there.

I actually picked up,

I was in Barnes and Nobles on Monday.

I saw like a Tony Robbins book in the window and I went and I picked it up because I wanted to like see like what book they had on him.

And as I was walking past there was a new release,

I don't know the name of it,

But it was,

I think it's like a comedian,

But it was a guy and he went into a monastery for whatever,

A month or a couple months or something.

And it was like a book about that.

And I was like,

Oh,

That's interesting.

And I picked it up and opened it up and saw like,

Well,

What does he have to say about that?

And he said one of the things he realized was that all of the small things the monks do with great care,

Things like making the bed,

Things like cleaning the floor,

All of these really simple throwaway tasks that we usually just try to rush through or don't even bother doing,

The monks do kind of full wholeheartedly,

Full mindedly,

Thoroughly with great attention and care.

And he said,

But you know,

There's that saying that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

And that's also something that I can say in the monastery,

You know,

That,

That there is also this quality where you are more present,

You're going slower,

You're doing the task with more care and with more love in that moment.

That means that your mind is a mind imbued with care,

With love,

With,

You know,

Presence and slowness.

And then as soon as you finish that task,

You kind of look up and everything around you is kind of shining and moving slowly,

You know,

Because you've just dropped into this really beautiful space of presence.

So practicing doing anything in our lives a little bit more mindfully,

A little bit slower with more care,

With more attention.

You know,

We did walking meditation for a while.

And even when you leave this class,

You know,

I see a lot of you,

Right,

The bell rings,

We get up,

We go and then people start chatting already and you start walking out and,

You know,

We jump right back in a worldly mind.

You know,

You can also practice walking meditation from here to your car.

You know,

You could practice walking meditation through the grocery store.

I've done it,

It's great.

Put on a pair of headphones,

You know,

And I just walk really slowly.

I go like a little bit later at night,

So there's not as many people there.

Yeah,

And shopping in the grocery store,

It became,

Wow,

This is so pleasant.

Usually I feel like drained after being in there,

You know,

But it was like,

Oh,

This is nice.

I'm just kind of in my own space.

I'm going slowly.

I'm looking at things.

And slowing down,

I think just saying it that easily,

Just slowing down,

It's a game changer,

Right?

Completely just puts the whole thing on its head and allows you to drop into a meditative space wherever you are.

And if you do that enough and you start infusing that quality into more and more of your life,

Like Thich Nhat Hanh and his community at Plum Village or Blue Cliff in New York,

And even,

You know,

Even the monks that I was with when I was practicing with the Thai monks in Australia,

One of,

You know,

We had different jobs.

One of my jobs was like sweeping the paths,

Right?

So I'd go out and I would just silently have this broom and I would just sweep the leaves off of the path for an hour and a half,

You know,

And I'd sweep very thoroughly and I'd be like sweeping.

And it's this beautiful thing to sweep a path outside.

It's kind of this weird thing.

One of the teachings they often talk about is when you sweep the path and you turn around and new leaves have already fallen and covered the part that you've swept and you don't feel like you need to now go back and re-sweep all of that,

That you can say to yourself,

Well,

My job is anyway done for today,

That you can still put in your work and you can turn around and that work is completely gone and you can still feel a total sense of peace because that's the nature of life is that things keep coming and there is no end.

And you could try to be like an anal,

You know,

Keep sweeping,

Keep sweeping,

Keep sweeping.

But there was a time that the Buddha went to this monastery,

Went to this monk and the monastery was really kept very nicely and orderly and shiny and nice.

And the Buddha looked at the monk and he was like,

What are you doing?

You know,

Let this place go to ruins.

Meditate.

Yeah.

Don't spend your whole day cleaning your monastery and making it all nice for what?

Yeah.

Because the monastery is supposed to be here for you to practice in.

Let it all become,

Let it fall apart.

Because if you think about it,

What would you rather go see?

A really beautiful monastery with a bunch of stressed monks running around,

Right?

Would you rather go to some kind of old dilapidated place and you look inside and there's this kind of radiant shining being in there like peeking back out at you and be like,

Oh my God,

Like that's a holy place,

Right?

When I was in India,

You walk around sometimes and there's like these like ruins of like old ashrams and stuff and you'll see people sometimes practicing.

And I've seen people that were like glowing,

Right,

From their energies.

It's beautiful kind of just like a holy vibe coming off of people,

You know,

And they'd be sitting in like rundown,

You know,

Old things that nobody was tending to or in cemeteries or kind of by the edge of a lake or,

You know,

They weren't spending all their time worrying about everything around them.

They were really focusing on the quality of their own minds,

How they were doing things.

And so this whole thing about slowing down and being peaceful and being present,

It's a whole part of the practice and it's really important.

But then there is also the qualities that are with that presence because I can be really present with all of you in the room and simultaneously be looking at all of your weaknesses,

Right?

I could be sitting here really present and be like,

Oh,

You stress too much,

You complain too much,

You're too this,

You're too that.

I could be very present,

But I could be judging,

Shooting the gun,

Right?

I could also be sitting here very present.

Wow,

I feel so supported by you.

It's so nice when you smile.

I'm so happy that you came,

That I can go through and I can be looking at everybody with eyes of love and gratitude.

And that feeds the presence,

Right,

That opens up the heart that makes this moment feel more abrasive,

More warm,

More beautiful,

More uplifted and buoyant.

The way that we're looking at the world,

Our view,

What qualities do we want to bring into the presence of the mind to create more positive,

More wholesome states,

Super important.

Because the Tibetans would actually make fun of the Thai monks and they'd say,

What,

You guys think you're enlightened because you're sitting all day long?

They'd say,

You know who else sits all day long?

Chickens.

You guys think chickens are enlightened?

It's really interesting that there's all these interesting dynamics of the monks of different traditions poking at each other.

And it's good,

I think it's a way for people to have to reflect and move forward and can be supportive,

But sometimes they mean it and they get lost in actually disparaging other monks.

It's like,

Guys,

Negativity is not the point either.

But yeah,

So that's all kind of things to look at and to cultivate within the calmness of the mind and the peace and the beingness,

You also need to have wisdom,

Right?

Because it's true,

Chickens,

They just sit there all day long.

It is true,

Right?

So being kind of peaceful and calm and just blah,

Like a sloth or something,

Right?

That's not necessarily a sign of enlightenment,

Like eternal,

Right?

It just means that you're slow or that you're maybe just kind of not interested,

Right?

Or something.

So I would say that in the meditation itself,

If you notice that you're getting really peaceful,

That's awesome.

How can I deepen that peace?

How can I connect more to some positive qualities in that peace?

How can I make some more intense,

Positive,

Pleasurable feelings within that,

Right?

Whether bringing gratitude into that peace,

Whether focusing on the peace itself,

But also focusing,

For instance,

On the breath,

Right?

That I'm really peaceful,

Awesome,

Next step.

What is my meditation object?

Feel the breath start bringing in concentration because meditation,

It's a polarity between two things,

Right?

One of the things in that polarity is the letting go,

The relaxation,

The peacefulness,

The dropping,

Right,

Letting things drop away.

But as things drop away,

What is being created on the other end of that polarity is presence.

Yeah,

If you were just relaxing without the presence,

What's happening?

You're falling asleep.

If you have the presence,

But you're not relaxed,

What happens is you're restless,

Right?

But the polarity between those two is when everything drops away.

But the more things drop away,

The more the mind is shining and sharp and present and awake.

Yeah,

The more the mind is awake and everything drops away until all that's left is that awakeness.

Yeah,

That everything disappears except for that awakeness,

Except for the presence,

That beingness.

Yeah,

That's what meditation is.

That's the balance.

So if you're getting relaxed,

But you're not progressing on your meditation,

As you might want to say,

Then look at focus.

So I'm getting really relaxed,

I'm really peaceful,

I'm really here.

Cool.

Let me start feeling more intensely the breath.

Let me stay with the object.

Just stay with the feeling of the breath brushing back and forth across the nose.

If you feel really calm and you can sit for a half an hour,

If you can sit for an hour,

Great.

Feel the breath for an hour brushing back and forth across the nose.

I promise you something will happen.

So also,

Since this is the last class and you guys hopefully want to keep practicing,

I am pretty certain that I have downloaded enough information into your minds that you can meditate for three months by yourself.

But again,

I do have on iTunes and on SoundCloud,

Like 150 or more talks now.

And also there's tons of other things on YouTube,

There's tons of talks out there from different monks,

Different people.

As far as meditation groups go,

I know that Thich Nhat Hanh's community,

They have little groups all over the world that they practice with.

I know there's a bunch even like around here on the Boston area.

There's one like Lexington.

And you could probably find that through their website or just typing in like Thich Nhat Hanh Meditation Boston and see kind of what comes up.

But yeah,

There's nothing that I know unfortunately,

Right?

Because a lot of the things that I see,

They're very tradition based practices.

There's like a Thai monastery or like a Tibetan monastery,

Like Chinese monastery,

Different kind of monasteries,

But some of them aren't so accessible.

So it's not that easy to say like,

Yeah,

I know where there's a meditation group.

I wish they should really make a website that's meditationgroup.

Com where you can just type in your location and wherever you are,

There's maybe there are websites like that.

But it is important to keep a regular practice for yourselves.

And this is important to have a Sangha,

Right,

A group of people.

Again I do also have a group I sit with tomorrow night.

So you're all invited to come if you want to.

It's in Acton,

So 35 School Street in Acton.

It's at a church in the basement,

645 to 8.

And they'll be sitting,

They sit every week and they have different teachers come or they have like videos they watch and stuff.

So there is a local meditation group right here,

Like 10 minutes from here,

That sits weekly that you could join.

But I would really say that most importantly,

Again,

Moving forward is to remember that it's on you,

That if you do nothing,

There will be nothing.

And if you want something,

Then you have to do something.

And one of the other things,

The Tony Robbins book that I saw at Barnes and Noble,

After that monk book,

I also just opened it up randomly.

And it talked about this neuro-associative conditioning thing that I had mentioned earlier.

And it said that if you want to make a change in your life,

That you take whatever the habit or the activity or the behavior that is causing you difficulty or pain or whatever,

And he said you have to associate massive,

Immediate pain to it.

And you have to then associate massive,

Immediate pleasure to its solution.

So for instance,

In layman's terms,

I feel good when I go to the gym regularly,

But it's easy to feel lazy and to not want to do that and to rather sit at home.

And I have to shift that.

I have to associate sitting at home and not doing,

Not getting my body up.

I have to associate that with pain and discomfort and stagnation in an unbearable kind of way,

In an immediate kind of way.

And I have to associate going to the gym with something that feels really important,

Really good,

Really amazing.

And this is also the way that the Buddha would often talk.

He said you should practice like your head is on fire.

You should practice not like I could die tomorrow,

Like I could die after this breath.

And he really tried to arise the energy in his students to practice by kind of using these techniques and say things could get horrible right now if you don't practice.

And that's just kind of like a training,

Something you could do to kind of train yourself and to play with yourself.

But again,

It all comes back to sitting more.

It's a time game.

Yeah,

I would definitely say the more you sit,

The more regularly you sit.

That's how you'll get the results like anything else.

Becoming familiar with it and then slowly making steps,

Slowly sitting and feeling.

I was in the monastery for eight years and I would say maybe five or six of those years I was not meditating properly.

But I was feeling it out and I was learning just how to sit.

And I felt like after I built up that foundation,

Then I heard a teaching on the right way to meditate and my mind just shot right into it because it was already at the foundation built up.

Yeah,

So it's really just about doing it and practicing it.

And again,

From my side,

So on Sethmonk.

Com,

I have my meditation mastery.

Every week I give a talk in a guided meditation.

And that's kind of my way of trying to support people from wherever I am or for wherever they are.

But again,

It really just comes to you to make that step,

Whatever that step looks like.

Whether that step means I'm going to join the program to do it or I'm going to go to a meditation class to do it or I'm just going to commit to sitting twice a week or whatever it is for you.

That it really just comes down to you just making a decision to just change,

To do something,

To move yourself in the right direction.

And it's really that kind of easy and straightforward.

You know,

And it's nice and I like that some of you are also realizing that meditation feels good.

Right?

That when you meditate,

You connect to this place of relief.

You connect to this place of peace and grounding.

Because the more that you can feel that,

The more that you meditate and you feel like it's a refresh.

Like I feel recharged and refreshed and rested,

Like my mind could finally rest.

I just slept and my mind doesn't feel rested,

But now it feels rested in the meditation.

The more that you can make that experience of what that feels like to rest the mind,

And when you don't do it that it feels like there's a hole,

Like something's missing,

Right?

You start meditating because you want to.

Right?

Because it feels good.

That's how I started eating healthy foods.

I'd eat something sugary and I'd feel that my body gets tired and heavy and sleepy.

Right?

Or I'd eat salad and I'd feel like my stomach felt cool and I felt like I had energy and it was like digesting easily.

And just by feeling that,

By feeling what feels good for me,

Naturally I just started eating healthier foods and that's still today.

It's just like what I enjoy.

You know in meditation it's the same way.

It's just the more that you can experience for yourself that this feels good.

Yeah?

Just that simple that it feels good just to rest.

You know even if you're not getting any results quote unquote,

But even just that it feels good to take a rest and that is the result.

Yeah even if your mind was spinning the whole time,

If you feel like you've slowed down a little bit,

Like you've rested a little bit,

Like you're just a little bit more in touch with yourself,

Yeah then you've done it.

That's a result.

Congratulations.

And the more that you can connect to that,

The more you can build that up,

The more you're going to want to do it.

So I again just really encourage you to just,

This conditioning,

Just to really feel into that.

Feel into how good it's felt to be in this class once a week to have this pulse.

Right?

You're saying like this anchor,

This pulse in your schedule,

That situations are coming and going,

Emotions are coming and going,

Things,

Stories are coming and going,

But that you can just have this pulse in your week that every once a week you can just sit and come back and let everything kind of fall away and ground yourself.

Right?

It's so important and the more you do it,

Again you guys know you've been here,

You realize wow this is like essential to living.

This is like essential to life.

To have these moments where I just drop in and I stop.

Yeah and then I can go out and then I stop and then whatever happens isn't that bad because you know that you've built a ground.

Yeah and you need to eventually be able to build that ground for yourself as well.

Right to always have that.

And it's such a liberating experience.

I love sitting with groups,

Don't get me wrong.

I think this is great and important.

And simultaneously when you have a practice by yourself,

When you yourself at home sit because you wanted to do it,

Yeah it's such an empowering feeling because now you're like I'm not even dependent on anybody.

Now I can connect to this piece whenever I want to when it feels good for me.

Right that suddenly it's like you have wings that you can fly with versus like needing to jump on somebody else's airplane.

Yeah and that's really eventually the point one of my teachers Achim Brahme said you know I'm not here to collect students.

He said I know I'm a good teacher when all of you leave.

Yeah that when all of you don't need me anymore then my job is done.

Right and he said that should be the job of any teacher is to try to get rid of the students actually.

Yeah that you guys have learned enough that you can go off and practice without me.

And I think that's kind of the point.

So that being said I will anyway be back in three months.

So why don't you really take this as like a three month training ground and see what you can do.

Right put in a little effort.

See if you could have a little discipline a little determination combine it with passion combine it with this feeling that it feels good that you want it for yourself.

Get some support from other groups from my meditation program from talks on YouTube or talks on iTunes or whatever it is.

Yeah find your way to piece it together and then let's talk again in December and see how we did.

Yeah maybe I'll sit here and all of you are like glowing and like floating off of your cushions.

OK it worked you know.

But yeah more than anything else it's really just up to you and that's and that's a great thing.

Yeah you're in trouble if it's on somebody else.

Yeah but you are all completely in control of how your practice goes and that's beautiful and that's great.

So I wish you well with that.

I wish you luck and I believe in you guys I trust you.

You've learned a lot.

You can't unlearn the things you've heard here.

So I brainwashed you as thoroughly as I can.

So you're now stuck with all of this information and knowledge.

So with that we're going to do our last meditation of this course.

So we're going to get into our seats.

Feel comfortable.